Information and Communication Technologieshttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/taxonomy/term/267/all
enSocial Media at the World Bank: Opening up the Spring Meetings With Live Interviews, Your Questionshttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/social-media-at-the-world-bank-opening-up-the-spring-meetings-with-live-interviews-your-questions
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>
<a href="http://live.worldbank.org/5-questions-5-minutes"><img alt="5 Questions in 5 Minutes" height="160" src="http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/files/insidetheweb/images/01_275x160_5questions_01.jpg" style="float:right" title="" width="275" /></a></p>
<p>
The twists and turns of the global economy have been the focus of conversations in board rooms, backyards and everything in between since 2008. <span class="shareable-quote"><a class="popup" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=A+new+dialogue+has+emerged+about+the+future&url=http://bit.ly/1nGAucE&via=worldbank" >A new dialogue has emerged about the future<img class="tw-icon-over" height="12" width="12" src="/sites/all/modules/wb_helper/images/iconm-twitter-gray.png"></a></span> – including how to protect the very poorest, create economic opportunity and ensure equality. Amid this, the upcoming Spring Meetings will convene a conversation on several of these themes, including <a href="http://live.worldbank.org/close-gap-safety-nets-work-liveblog-webcast">social safety nets</a>, <a href="http://live.worldbank.org/jobs-or-growth-which-comes-first-liveblog-webcast">job growth</a>, <a href="http://live.worldbank.org/closing-gap-financial-inclusion-liveblog-webcast">access to finance</a> and <a href="http://live.worldbank.org/new-frontiers-womens-empowerment-liveblog-webcast">gender equality</a>.</p>
<p>
<br />
​</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 13 Apr 2012 02:23:00 +0000Jim Rosenberg596 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebBuilding a Better Toolbox for Developmenthttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/building-a-better-toolbox-for-development
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><strong> </strong>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold"><font size="3"><font color="#000000"><font face="Calibri">Every day we are reminded that the challenges faced in eradicating poverty are multifaceted and include complex economic, social, political, and cultural dimensions. For this reason, we work with a number of partners and experiment with many technologies to try and leverage the right community with the right skills and tools to address a given challenge. </font></font></font></span></p></div></div></div>Mon, 23 Jan 2012 03:33:00 +0000Soren Gigler573 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebAccess to Information Marks One-Year Anniversaryhttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/access-to-information-marks-one-year-anniversary
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>July 1, 2011—The World Bank today marks the one-year anniversary of its <a href="http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2010/06/03/000112742_20100603084843/Rendered/PDF/548730Access0I1y0Statement01Final1.pdf">Access to Information (AI) policy</a>. The landmark policy increases transparency, accessibility and accountability of the Bank’s operations and programs.<br /><br />Bank management and external stakeholders agree that implementation has gone well.</p></div></div></div>Fri, 01 Jul 2011 20:04:39 +0000Hannah George567 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebTake action to put food firsthttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/take-action-to-put-food-first
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="rteright"> </p></div></div></div>Mon, 28 Mar 2011 20:38:41 +0000Jim Rosenberg560 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebSocial media on mobile phones: the future is cloudly, fast and applicablehttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/social-media-on-mobile-phones-the-future-is-cloudly-fast-and-applicable
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>This week I&rsquo;m at the <a href="http://www.mobileworldcongress.com">Mobile World Congress</a>, the annual jamboree for some 50,000 people from 200 countries whose livelihoods are focused on the device you probably wake up with, carry everywhere with you, and are more likely to miss than even your misplaced or stolen credit card: your mobile phone. I&rsquo;m here because <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/103910/20110123/social-media-mobile-phones-make-global-travel-trendy.htm">more than half of social media activity globally happens via mobile handsets</a> and because if people from Mashable, Twitter, FourSquare and Google are turning up at the same place at the same time, it&rsquo;s probably worth checking out. 2011 is signaling the full-on dominance of mobile web, internet, and social media in the mobile space.</p>
<p><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="320" height="195" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/_u98wGKS7u0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" align="right"></iframe></p>
<p>There&rsquo;s much to be in awe of here. In just the past 48 hours I&rsquo;ve played with the <a href="http://www.cnet.com.au/videos/play/22533662/">3-D handset on offer from LG</a>, and seen a friend based in Nairobi brandish a $50 Huawei smartphone with Google&rsquo;s operating system, Android (note that in the U.S., the typical Android handset costs north of $500 without subsidy from a mobile operator). &nbsp;And for the two billion or so people globally who probably can&rsquo;t afford even a $50 handset, there was welcome news Monday when a firm called Gemalto announced that it had crafted what I&rsquo;d call a poor man&rsquo;s version of <a href="http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/02/15/6058046-facebook-takes-over-the-world-one-sim-card-at-a-time">Facebook, housed on a SIM card </a>and using SMS to send and receive data between handsets and Facebook servers. This means Facebook, which already reaches 600 million people, will potentially be available to almost anyone on the planet with a mobile device.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:47:44 +0000Jim Rosenberg555 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebTuning in to Facebook’s global frequencyhttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/tuning-in-to-facebook-s-global-frequency
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><iframe width="540" height="304" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.qwiki.com/embed/Facebook" type="text/html" class="qwiki-player"></iframe></p>
<p>Though I work full-time on social media for the World Bank, my career started in public broadcasting. &ldquo;Radio is the modern version of oral tradition,&rdquo; a former journalism professor of mine would say, likening radio to the way in which people have communicated for years: using stories, narratives, to connect, to break down complex ideas into concrete pieces. That line resonated with me, summing up the power of radio to connect people using the shared experience of a broadcast.</p>
<p>Radio was &ndash; and still is - one of the most intimate forms of media ever created. It comes right into our homes, our cars, our showers (if you are lucky enough to <a href="http://water.org/learn-about-the-water-crisis/facts/">have a shower</a>). I&rsquo;d wager that in any city in the world, people spend more time with the radio than they do any other form of media.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Unless they&rsquo;re on Facebook. That&rsquo;s different. I can&rsquo;t recall when Facebook started getting more of my time than did the radio. Probably not long after I joined Facebook, in 2007. Four years ago, Facebook had <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia">30 million</a> users.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 25 Jan 2011 18:18:24 +0000Jim Rosenberg553 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebIt’s About the Data not Just the Mapshttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/it-s-about-the-data-not-just-the-maps
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>&nbsp;It&rsquo;s been remarkable to me to see the level of excitement generated by the World Bank&rsquo;s early efforts to &ldquo;mash-up&rdquo; the location of development projects within countries with MDG indicators like infant mortality, attended child births, and malnutrition. Being able to visualize correlations between poverty and the location of development projects is sometimes surprising, often encouraging and never uninteresting.<br />
<br />
Why are health projects concentrated in parts of country X where life expectancy is high? Where are the water and education projects in country Y in districts with the highest rates of under 5 mortality? The answers are seldom straightforward but good data and simple visualizations can provoke good questions, healthy debates and animate stories of what&rsquo;s going on. Some will be stories worth celebrating for replication and others will be about lessons learned and things to avoid. </p>
<p>But getting caught-up in the mapping narrative almost misses the point. In a geo-enabled world, many people can create maps and different maps will tell different stories. The key is liberating the underlying data that allows people to create maps in the first place. That&rsquo;s what has started at the World Bank and where <a href="http://maps.worldbank.org">Mapping for Results</a> goes beyond traditional GIS and mapping projects. It&rsquo;s about geo-enabling the Bank and creating the foundational data that will allow for all kinds of analysis, better planning, better monitoring, and eventually direct engagement with citizens based on actual data. </p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:26:16 +0000Aleem Walji548 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebWolfram Data Summit 2010: The Future Is Nowhttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/wolfram-data-summit-2010-an-eye-to-the-future
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>
I spent the day at <a href="http://www.wolframdatasummit.org/">Wolfram Data Summit 2010</a>, where repository managers and experts from all over the world have convened in Washington to discuss the rewards -- and challenges -- of a new data frontier.</p>
<p>
A series of speakers shared fascinating insights on the <em>power</em> of data, including examples of how data is at the forefront of new and exciting developments in the fields of medicine, health care, science, lexicography, media and more.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:50:00 +0000Amy Adkins Harris538 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebVisualizing Past Milestones with an Eye to the Futurehttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/visualizing-past-milestones-with-an-eye-to-the-future
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Rebuilding Europe&rsquo;s steel capacity after WWII. Jump-starting Japan&rsquo;s bullet trains. Eradicating riverblindness. Coordinating a global phase-out of leaded fuels. Renewing tsunami-ravaged Indonesia.<br />
<br />
The world shares many major milestones with the World Bank&rsquo;s own history.&nbsp; Our newly re-designed results timeline offers a &ldquo;greatest hits&rdquo; of international achievements with Bank involvement:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.worldbank.org/results/#timeline">http://www.worldbank.org/results/#timeline</a><br />
<a href="http://www.worldbank.org/results/#timeline"><img width="520" height="280" alt="" src="http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/files/insidetheweb/results-timeline.jpg" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 10 May 2010 13:49:14 +0000Molly Norris534 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebSustaining a multilingual web presence: an updatehttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/sustaining-a-multilingual-web-presence-an-update
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>A few months ago, Valerie Hufbauer presented to the Web Managers Roundtable here in DC on sustaining a <a href="http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/sustaining-a-multilingual-web-presence">multilingual web presence here at the Bank</a>.</p>
<p>I promised to get her slides up as soon as I could — we had a lot of people asking about them — but I've been remiss in my obligation. Apologies for the long delay, but here it is, Valerie's presentation from October 2009:<br />
</p></div></div></div>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:36:35 +0000Sameer Vasta523 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebThinking of tabletshttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/thinking-of-tablets
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>I may spend my entire day staring at a computer screen, but when I'm not at work, I'm an avid magazine reader. Because of that, I've become increasingly interested in how the magazine industry is responding to the changes in media consumption and content delivery.</p></div></div></div>Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:44:41 +0000Sameer Vasta521 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebRandom Hacks of Kindness support disaster relief projectshttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/random-hacks-of-kindness-support-disaster-relief-projects
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyjohnstone/4111595456/"><img alt="Random Hacks of Kindness / Photo by Jeremy Johnstone" vspace="5" hspace="5" border="1" align="middle" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2662/4111595456_626e9b459f.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>A couple of weeks ago, a few <a href="http://worldbank.org">World Bank</a> staff members teamed up with <a href="http://google.com">Google</a>, <a href="http://microsoft.com">Microsoft</a>, <a href="http://yahoo.com">Yahoo!</a>, <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/home/index.html">NASA-AMES</a>, disaster relief experts, and the software developer community in Mountain View, California to help find better ways to support disaster relief efforts.</p>
<p>The result, the <a href="http://www.rhok.org/">Random Hacks of Kindness</a> Codejam, brought together about 150 people at the <a href="http://hackerdojo.pbworks.com/">Hacker Dojo</a>, and resulted in some innovative hacks (or solutions to technical problems) that will hopefully shape the way the developer community supports disaster relief efforts going forward.</p>
<p>There has been a lot of coverage of the event already (including <a href="http://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/random-hacks-of-kindness-software-developers-create-and-share-code-to-tackle-disaster-relief">a great post on the East Asia &amp; Pacific on the rise blog</a>), so instead of going in to that, here's a quick list of posts and articles about the event that you might want to check out:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/random-hacks-of-kindness-software-developers-create-and-share-code-to-tackle-disaster-relief">East Asia &amp; Pacific on the rise: Random Hacks of Kindness: software developers create and share code to tackle disaster relief</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.hfoss.org/?p=170">Humanitarian FOSS Project: Random Hacks of Kindness</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.emergencymgmt.com/emergency-blogs/disaster-sociologist/Random-Hacks-of-Kindness.html">Emergency Management: Random Hacks of Kindness</a></li>
<li><a href="http://incaseofemergencyblog.com/2009/11/12/random-hacks-of-kindness-starts-today-give-camp-brings-together-tech-competitors-incl-microsoft-google-yahoo-with-disaster-experts-to-help-on-crisis-preparednessresponse/">In Case of Emergency Blog:&nbsp;&ldquo;Random Hacks Of Kindness&rdquo; Starts Today</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.opennasa.com/2009/11/13/random-hacks-of-kindness/">openNASA: Random Hacks of Kindness</a></li>
<li><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10398073-245.html">CNET: Hackers Create Tools for Disaster Relief</a></li>
<li><a href="http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10001884.html">CNET Photos: Random Hacks of Kindness</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blogs.esri.com/Dev/blogs/publicsafety/archive/2009/11/18/ESRI-at-the-Random-Hacks-of-Kindness-Codejam.aspx">ESRI at the Random Hacks of Kindness Codejam</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.afcea.org/signal/articles/templates/Signal_Article_Template.asp?articleid=2128&amp;zoneid=276">AFCEA: &ldquo;Random Hacks of Kindness&rdquo; to Aid Emergency Response</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/news-events/news/2009/geocam-wins.html">CMU:&nbsp;Carnegie Mellon Team Wins First Prize at Random Hacks of Kindness</a></li>
</ul>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:34:02 +0000Sameer Vasta519 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebDevelopment Marketplace goes social (media)http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/development-marketplace-goes-social-media
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/55062826@N00/4095831027/in/pool-1305154@N22"><img alt="Shooting video at the 2009 Development Marketplace" align="middle" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2770/4095831027_50bc68f5f0.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>This year's <a href="http://www.developmentmarketplace.org/">Development Marketplace</a> global competition did more than just find ideas to save the world: it shared the ideas and the people who make them happen with the rest of us.</p></div></div></div>Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:38:02 +0000Sameer Vasta518 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebWorldBank.org/Slideshowshttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/worldbankorgslideshows
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The human toll of natural disasters in Vietnam… entrepreneurs in Rwanda… wind power in Egypt… an infant with jaundice in Nepal… World Bank slideshows connect users with diverse people and places through the open window of a computer screen.</p></div></div></div>Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:54:29 +0000Molly Norris514 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidethewebPreliminary thoughts from Web 2.0 Summithttp://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/preliminary-thoughts-from-web-20-summit
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>I've been here in San Francisco for the past few days, and when I haven't been stuffing my face with burritos and <a href="http://bluebottlecoffee.net/">Blue Bottle coffee</a>, I've been spending time at the <a href="http://www.web2summit.com/web2009">Web 2.0 Summit</a>.</p>
<p>I'll jot down some more coherent and cohesive thoughts about the <a href="http://www.web2summit.com/web2009">Summit</a> during my red-eye back to DC later tonight, but for now, I wanted to share a few presentations, issues, and ideas that have jumped out at me during the session so far.</p></div></div></div>Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:55:15 +0000Sameer Vasta513 at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb